The Pirate Bay moves to The Cloud, becomes “raid-proof”

Written by FACT Team on Thursday, October 18

Leading Torrent website The Pirate Bay has switched its entire operation to The Cloud.

In short, rather than being hosted on one website – and, naturally, an orbit of Torrents – The Pirate Bay’s content will serve its users via several cloud hosting providers around the world. The Pirate Bay has been hit with several pieces of legislation in recent years, the most notable being four key members of the site were jailed in 2009, and when UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were ordered to block the website in 2012. Publicly at least, they’ve revelled in fighting the law at any opportunity, including claiming this year that they would experiment with holding their machines in small airborne drones.

Torrent Freak report that “the move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure”. They also claim that the move to The Cloud only resulted in five minutes of downtime.

“The Pirate Bay is currently hosted at cloud hosting companies in two countries where they run several Virtual Machine (VM) instances”, Torrent Freak‘s article continues, before quoting The Pirate Bay on the following: “running on VMs cuts down operation costs and complexity. For example, we never need anyone to do hands-on work like earlier this month when we were down for two days because someone had to fix a broken power distribution unit.”

“If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can just buy new virtual servers from the next provider. Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.”

“If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images.”